Last year, the international affairs thinktank Atlantic Council made an interesting new hire. Keen to draw on ideas about the future of war from various areas of speculative fiction, the organisation – which advises on global security policy and holds meetings for heads of state and military leaders – announced that game designer Dave Anthony would become a nonresident fellow in its Brent Scowcroft Center. Anthony was, until that point, a writer on the Call of Duty: Black Ops titles.

Britain’s most respected opinion pollster has warned Labour its chances of winning a majority at the next election verge on the “improbable” and that blaming its defeat on a shift away from Blairism is “wholly inadequate”.

The first big dividing lines of the Labour leadership contest opened up on Thursday when Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, refused to accept that Labour had spent too much prior to the 2007 banking crisis, making the economy more vulnerable when the crash came.